“On a missile.” That, according to media reports, was Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s answer when Russian journalists asked when he would come to Moscow. The same reports say he followed it with a swear word.
The exchange sits inside a story Bloomberg published on September 25, by way of European Pravda: that Donald Trump had again pressed the Ukrainian president to travel to Moscow and meet Vladimir Putin, and that Zelenskyy had refused. Bloomberg placed the request at their meeting in New York on September 22, where Trump wanted him to go for talks on ending the war.
Sources familiar with Zelenskyy’s position told the agency that he rejected the idea and was irritated that Trump had raised it. The White House did not answer Bloomberg’s request for comment.
Kyiv disputes the whole account. The Office of the President called the report “false information.”
A week of shuttle meetings
The alleged request came in a busy week for American diplomacy around the war. In New York, Zelenskyy and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov each held separate meetings with representatives of the Trump administration. Washington pushed both sides to agree to a truce on strikes against each other’s energy facilities, with global diesel prices climbing sharply.
Zelenskyy said on September 25 that technical peace talks among the US, Ukraine and Russia would probably be held in the United Arab Emirates, though the Americans had not yet proposed a date. He had earlier suggested that the G20 summit in Miami could host a three-way meeting. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said he hopes Putin will come to that summit in December. It later emerged that Putin had turned down Zelenskyy’s proposal to talk on the sidelines of the G20.
So the Moscow idea, if Trump did raise it, would have run against a track that already points elsewhere: a neutral venue in the Gulf, or a summit in Florida.
Sources
- Trump asked Zelenskyy to travel to Moscow for meeting with Putin, but he refused, Bloomberg says
- Trump asked Zelenskyy to travel to Moscow for meeting with Putin, but he refused, Bloomberg says
